Wednesday, February 1, 2012

My word for 2012 is Abundance. Every month, as part of an online class with Ali Edwards, I receive a prompt -- that month's assignment. For January, we are exploring our word: "Name it. Claim it. Invite it. Define it."

My finished page

There are 5 cards with specific prompts and 4 cards to use as we are called.
Where one puts each card in the holder is also up to individual choice.

Some of the other participants have specific colour schemes. I'm not sure if I do, tho I like how everything looks so nice with the Japanese origami paper. I have a feeling next month other colours will call to me and the album will end up a rainbow, or perhaps I should say an abundance of colours!

The cards in the next 2 photos were my favorite to make. On both cards, the printed words were done on my computer. I had to figure out how to fit the words on the cards and how to get the right color so they can be read but also act as a background for the stamped images. I'm not the daughter of an engineer for nothing. I liked the challenge!

I typed two sentences over & over again on this card. The first talks about how the superlatives of Love fill all space. The second sentence is "That is enough." One of the concepts I am exploring is "what is enough?" So this seemed a perfect background for my 2012 word.

I typed up all the synonyms of the words on my thesaurus card and ended with the sentence I used on the gray abundance card. I stamped the sunflower on white cardstock, added gold embossing powder, then cut it out and attached it to the card with a mounting square to give dimensionality.

Title Page attached to January prompts.

I was pretty obsessive about this month's assignment. It's funny cuz I didn't think it had to be perfect. It just had to look "right." So, I started out doing all the prompts in my own handwriting. It didn't look bad and generally I like my handwriting. But it didn't look spectacular and I really wanted this to shine.

I know better than to compare myself to other artists. Now knowing better and actually not comparing are of course two different things! Still I know my competitive side and work really hard not to be held hostage by her! So at least I finished version 1 before going to the class gallery to see what others had done. I saw how some people had used typefaces instead of handwriting and I thought this looked really good. So version 2 had all the prompts typed. Again, it didn't look bad, but it seemed a little too much the same (which is just a nice way of saying bor-ring). Version 3, which is what you see here is a combination of handwritten cards and typed cards. I also changed the card stock from stark white to a softer white, slightly thicker & textured paper. You should have heard my poor printer -- it did not like the soft white card stock -- and it sounded like an injured animal from Jurrasic Park. Version 3 also included re-writing one of the prompts. As I said, obsessive. But now, DONE! And I'm pleased. It is a nice beginning to my album.

Margie of Nihao, Cupcake is sponsoring this OLW blog hop. So you may have come here from Carmen's blog. I'm going to send you on to Kristina. Click here to see her word. Then she'll send you on to the next blog. I'll be out of town when this post appears and I don't know what sort of internet connection I will have. Which means I may not be able to get the list of participants added to this post ( it wasn't available when I left home) Please click here: Nihao, Cupcake.to see everyone. Bye and thanks for hopping by!Marilee